Category: Various

A Southern transplant to the Hawkeye State explains the fuss over his article, and the Iowa rules he broke. CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa -- Last week, as I was entering a strip-mall clothing boutique, I held the door for a woman I didn't know. She did a little trot to arrive at the door a fraction of a second earlier, expressed her thanks and then erupted in laughter. In answer to my raised eyebrows she explained: "We had family from Florida for the Thanksgiving holidays and they kept asking us, 'Why does everyone here hold the door for everyone else?' I told them that holding doors was just nice and a part of who we are. We like to do little things like that for each other. It's just respectful." I…

'I came face-to-face with protesters at the Kansas clinic where I had to terminate my pregnancy' I was warned there would be protesters. Don't make eye contact and don't engage or confront, I was instructed. I had every intention of obeying, but my eyes betrayed me and found the face of a woman standing on the kerb. She was roughly my age and as we moved closer I could see her dark fringe, which almost fell into her blue-green eyes. Her mouth and the mouths of all the people within the small crowd were moving, obviously saying something, but I heard nothing more than a dull roar. The whole scene was surreal, as if I was watching it on a screen. We began to move faster, along the edges of…

There were valuable parallels between the flooding in Iowa and Hurricane Katrina. But the media looked in the wrong places The distinctive beep of an car alarm being activated prompted many in southwest Cedar Rapids front yards to slow their flood cleanup and watch a man exit a vehicle with out-of-state license plates. "He set his car alarm?" asked a woman as she carried one end of a friend's soggy and smelly sofa to the curb. A flooded-out property owner considered and then jokingly replied: "Someone must have told him about all the homeless people in this area." [caption id="attachment_1807" align="alignleft" width="350"] The Tree of the Five Seasons is in the distance as floodwater swirls around the federal building at the corner of 2nd Ave SE and 1st St SE in downtown…